Amanda Shankle-Knowlton's Blog (5)

It’s been many, many years since I’ve cared about the NBA Finals. But one of the two teams is from my home town of Oklahoma City. In the past few years, the city in which I grew up went from having no basketball team, to having a mediocre basketball team, to having a great basketball team. It makes me vicariously proud, like the first time I saw my daughter write her…

A few years ago, I was in rural West Texas looking for headstones of family members in a cemetery. Fun way to spend a Saturday, right? It was nearly record-setting heat in July, and I didn’t bring enough water with me. The search took longer than any of us had expected and by the time I was thirsty, I was starting to feel awful. I found a rusty faucet in the ground and frantically turned the handle. I didn’t care if it was treated water that was safe to drink or not. It was wet, and that’s…

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m kind of a nerd. I heard on the news the other day that home prices are falling once again, and my first thought was “I want to see that graphed!” rather than “Oh no, the economy is collapsing!”

In a few political and data-visualization blogs the past several days, there has been a kerfuffle concerning this bar chart that the Wall Street Journal published. The gist of the chart is that the bulk of the taxable income in this country…